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This weekend, in the northern edge of my patch there will be a polo tournament.

Yep, that's right readers. A full blown 'high octane' polo tournament with ponies, pimms and toffs.

A little background. Hurlingham Park is a public park that had a running track on it and was popular with dog walkers, joggers and children. It is rubbish for birds because of this.

It was the venue for the Monty Python sketch Upper Class Twit Of The Year.

Next to Hurlingham Park is the Hurlingham Club which is pretty exclusive (the waiting list is about 15 years) and already has polo facilities and tennis and all that stuff. It also has the best collection of trees in the north side of the patch, and I can't get to it. It is where my recent Blackcap and singing Chiffchaff were.

Somebody thought that it was a good idea to rip up the running track, and put a new polo pitch in and sell it initially as being good for inner city kids (I shit you not) including the local councillor. Fool. Encouraging kids to play polo (especially from some of the estates round here) rather than running other such, slightly cheaper, sports is facile in the extreme.

They have kindly put a picture on their website of part of the patch, which I have of course stolen for your delectation.

The green patch in the middle is where there was once facilities for commoners, but is no more.

What all this has to do with a birding blog, I'm not entirely sure. The particular piece of land could barely gather in a blackbird in the winter never mind any other winter Thrushes and in the summer it's good for feral pigeons so it's not like I've lost good habitat or birds.

I just think it's daft, and a little apposite and amusing that the upper class twits have returned to the park.

2
comments:

Anonymous
said...

Damn! I liked the 'name that bird'game and for those of you that didnt know...... The Maleo, (Macrocephalon maleo), is a medium-sized (approximately 55cm long) blackish megapode with bare yellow facial skin, reddish-brown iris, reddish-orange beak and rosy salmon underparts. The crown is ornamented with a black helmet casque. The greyish blue feet have four long sharp claws, separated by a membranous web. The sexes are almost identical with a slightly smaller and duller female.

The only member of the monotypic genus Macrocephalon, the Maleo is endemic to the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. It is found in the tropical lowland and hill forests, but nests in the open sandy areas, volcanic soils or beaches that are heated by the sun or geothermal energy for incubation. (There are also megapode species that use fermenting compost to incubate their eggs.)

The Maleo's egg is large, about five times as large as that of the domestic chicken's. The female lays and covers each egg in a deep hole in the sand and allows the incubation to take place through solar or volcanic heating. After the eggs hatch, the young birds work their way up through the sand and hide in the forest. The young birds are able to fly and are totally independent. They must find food and defend themselves from predators such as lizards, pythons, wild pigs or cats.

The Maleo is monogamous, and members of a pair stay close to each other all the time. Its diet consists mainly of fruits, seeds, ants, termites, beetles and other small invertebrates........